Research summary

Angela Russell

Angela Russell’s research interests are in the field of medicinal chemistry.  She has several highly successful multidisciplinary research collaborations in this area including the development of arylamine N-acetyltransferase inhibitors (for the treatment of tuberculosis and cancer; collaboration with E. Sim, Oxford), transcriptional upregulation of utrophin (for the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy; collaboration with K. E. Davies, Oxford), and protein tyrosine phosphatase inhibitors (for the treatment of a variety of disease indications, including cancer; collaboration with S. Knapp, Oxford). All of these projects are ongoing, and in addition she has recently instigated a number of collaborations involving more fundamental approaches to chemical genomics/pharmacology. These include the study of developmental signalling pathways in a number of model organisms including Hedgehog and Wnt/Wingless (with J. Briscoe, J-P. Vincent and N. Itasaki, London) and Bone Morphogenetic Protein (with R. Patient, Oxford).

Key Research Areas

Development of small molecule modulators to study developmental signalling pathways, e.g. Hedgehog, Wnt/wingless and Bone Morphogenetic Protein.

Development of inhibitors to target challenging proteins, e.g. phosphatases or proteins where a physiological role is not clearly defined, e.g. acetyl transferases.

Development of new techniques and methodologies for compound library design and synthesis.

Angela Russell gained an MChem degree from Oxford University in 2000, which included a Part II project on the synthesis and evaluation of ion channel mimics under the supervision of Paul Beer. She gained her DPhil from Oxford in 2004 under the joint supervision of Steve Davies and Tim Perera from Yamanouchi plc (now Astellas Pharma Inc.). The main focus of her work was using a pharmacophore modelling approach for the development of novel phosphatase inhibitors but also encompassed the development of novel asymmetric methodologies and the synthesis of molecules of biological importance. In March 2006 she became a Departmental Research Lecturer in Organic Chemistry and in August 2007 was awarded an RCUK Fellowship in Medicinal Chemistry jointly between the Departments of Chemistry and Pharmacology in Oxford.

Collaborators

• Samira Alishahi
• Venetia Barrett
• Dr Carole Bataille
• Dr Matthew Durbin
• Rhian Holvey
• Dr Kilian Huber
• Nicola Laurieri
• Andrew Lomas
• Tim Rooney
• Zoe Wright